You Can't Get Up If You Never Fall Down
by loveislouder94
Summary: "All this time you've held yourself back and you've been waiting for something to release you, but Lily darling, the only one who can set you free is yourself." Lily Luna Potter, and learning how to live.


"I am living today as someone I had not yet become yesterday." - Andrea Gibson

Little Lily darling, you're more than a little bit broken. You're overshadowed and underestimated and perpetually confused. You're silver and green, a Slytherin at heart, so you hide, for a little while, behind good enough grades and an endless array of positivity you wish you knew how to believe in.

Inevitably, your fiction falls apart, just like you. Smiles come less frequently, tears come unexpectedly and uncontrollably. Homework becomes something you hand in late, or not at all, and every now and then you question this new zombie-self, but most of the time you just don't care.

The changes do not go unnoticed and there are questions, from your parents and James and Albus, from Teddy and Uncle Neville and Grandma Molly and every other member of your enormous, well-meaning family. You brush them off and really, you think, they should be watching Fred. He's hurting too, he just hides it better.

After you graduate, you're in limbo, hovering in that in between place that isn't school and isn't a job, a blank expanse of time that scares you with its endless possibilities and simultaneously makes you want to run, to take this life you've been given and _do _something with it, darkness be damned.

"I'm going to London," you announce one morning, and you're not surprised that your dad drops his spoon and your mum chokes on her tea.

They pepper you with questions like "why?" and "where will you live?" and "what will you do?" You don't answer, mainly because you don't know how, all you know is that you're grasping at the possibility that London might be different, that maybe in London, _you _couldbe different. It's a foolish hope, of course. You can run far and wide, little girl, but your environment's not the problem. The only thing keeping you caged is yourself.

In London, you move around various odd jobs just to pay the rent, sometimes in the wizarding world and sometimes mingling with Muggles. The Muggle community is your preference, if you're being honest, because you can blend in there, just another face lining the busy streets.

Such anonymity is impossible among witches and wizards for the daughter of Harry Potter. Most people know your face – it's been featured in _Witch Weekly _often enough, even though your parents have tried to give you as normal a life as possible. Wherever you go, you're recognised, and you can't describe how much it makes you want to show all of these people that you're not merely the daughter of a hero – you're Lily Luna Potter, and there's no label in the world broad enough to encompass all that you are.

Along the way you make acquaintances (not friends, you don't trust anyone enough for that) and every time it's the same.

"Hi," you say with a bright smile to match your bright red hair, "I'm Lily."

You're always polite and soon enough you've amassed a circle of semi-friends, people with whom you can while away the hours at the shop or the office or wherever you happen to be working. Occasionally you'll meet up for drinks outside work and for a short while you're just like everyone else.

It never lasts long, though, normal wasn't meant for you. No, you were made for extremes, for sadness so deep it has no name and joy so great you can't contain it, for everything that's beautiful and everything that's terrible and all the forgotten things in the middle.

You're falling, flailing, gasping struggling but you're so, so tired and you don't want to fight any more, don't even want to get out of bed because it all feels like a little bit too much, and can't you just have one day off?

You're lonely but not alone, and you're alone but you're not lonely and you think there's something off about that, the way you pull people in and then push them away, never quite sure what it is you want and even less sure how to get it.

There are days when you feel normal, or at least, as normal as you can, and you forget, every now and then, that you're walking blindly, and every step might send you tumbling into the abyss. Those days you write to Teddy and Dom and your parents and all the people you otherwise neglect and you don't feel alone or lonely or anything except blissfully alive.

Yet there are also days when you feel angry and furious and frustrated and so full of wrathful energy that you think you might explode. You don't understand and you hate this darkness, but you love it a little bit too, the familiarity and apparent safety of your solitude. It wraps you up, sheltering and suffocating all at once.

For a long time, you resent the way you think and feel and have to live, never free and always trapped in something you don't understand. And then one day you wake to fragments of sunlight slipping through the curtains of your London flat and you think, for no reason you can pinpoint, that you're okay.

This has happened before and it will happen again, and that's not the bitter pill it's been before. Every time you spiral down that cold and melancholy path, it feels just as real and inescapable and wrong as it always does and you despair that you'll claw your way out only to have to go through it all again.

Every time clarity cuts through the fog of your helplessness and hopelessness, it feels like a blessing, like the greatest thing you've ever known, because at that moment, it _is. _Brightness bathes the world, so many sounds and sights and feelings and oh, how you'd missed them!

All this time you've held yourself back and you've been waiting for something to release you, but Lily darling, the only one who can set you free is yourself.

Slowly, you start to, taking each day at a time. You write to your parents more often, eat enough and sleep enough and nourish your body with healthy foods and your spirit with healthy thoughts.

You still get sad sometimes and the world looks more black than anything else, and that's just part of who you are, but it gets easier. You keep going, Lily Luna Potter too large for a label, sometimes light, sometimes dark and always sure of your painful, precious humanity.

**Written for:**

**The Key Signatures Competition F# major  
HP Potions Competition - Antidote to Uncommon Poisons  
The Colours Competition - pink, negative write about someone wanting something or someone desperately (freedom, happiness, in case it wasn't immediately obvious)  
The Wand Wood Competition - Black Walnut (write about someone who is having an inner conflict)  
The Bookshelf Competition/Challenge Daniel Dafoe, Robinson Crusoe (write about someone who is completely alone)  
The Legendary Gods and Goddesses Competition - Kebechet (write about someone who is wandering, in a physical or mental sense)  
The Andrea Gibson Appreciation Competition  
The Quidditch fic Challenge/Competition - Seeker  
The Hogwarts Classes Category Competition - Divination  
The Gemstones Competition - Emerald  
The Popular Songs Competition - Wings**


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